The KillaCycle made the cover of Motor Age Magazine. Very positive article about electric and alternative fuels racing inside:
March 2011 Motor Age Magazine

Our feet are to the fire now. The top EV record in the 1/4 mile was just posted by Shawn Lawless on his 900+ HP “Rocket” bike piloted by the famous Larry McBride. They also bested our top MPH of 174 and they are the very first to exceed 175 mph with an EV on the drag strip.

Congratulations to Shawn and Larry McBride. They have worked hard and very much earned the honor of being the fastest EV on the drag strip.

It will be a few months before the weather allows drag racing locally. We are going to spend those months shaving weight from the KillaCycle, and adding just a bit more HP.

The KillaCycle crew spent the day with David Pogue and the PBS Nova film crew yesterday. (July 16th) They are doing a show about advanced battery technology.

Until they actually saw the first run at Bandimere Speedway, they did not fully believe “Zero to 60 mph in less than one second.” The film crew was not prepared for the acceleration on the launch. After the first run, they said, “It was on the starting line…and then it was just GONE!”

The camera crew attached little mini-cams all over the KillaCycle (and the ElectroCat ). They got fantastic action footage. Since the KillaCycle is an all-out racing machine, we did not concern ourselves with AC magnetic shielding or trying to minimize stray fields like you would do on a street EV. (Like you would not add a muffler to a racing ICE machine.) Thus, there were some very weird distortions in some of the on-board video footage. Kind of like science fiction force-field looking effects. I hope they show these “force field” clips.

You can see more photos in the photo album here.

It was a great pleasure meeting and working with the Nova team.

Picture: Meremere dragway in Auckland. Most of the day rained away. Even when the rain stopped, the track was too wet to run safely at full power.

Every show and dinner on the tour turned in to a mini-convention where people met that otherwise wouldn’t have met. With ten events during three weeks, that means a lot of people. We really helped to draw together a “critical mass” of NZ EVers.

One of the purposes of the tour was to promote and help the development of the Tumanako open-source motor-controller project. The Tumanako group, based in New Zealand, has built and is just on the edge of production distribution of an open-source 200 kW inverter and drive package. It is awesome and it is about time someone did this. This has potential to be the “Linux” for electric vehicles.

Motor-controllers are a big issue for _all_ racers and for small manufacturers. The motor-controllers you can buy are a “black box” and you have no access to change or modify the software for your needs, because the manufacturer will never give you the source code. Imagine buying a race engine where you can’t change the pistons or even set the ignition timing..? That is the case for electrics today. Information about the Tumanako group here. I will write more about them soon. We hope to use one of their motor-controllers in the motorcycle streamliner that Eva is building right now (more about that too soon). Eva and I are strongly supporting the open-source project and hope that more people will join the group to reach the critical mass where things start to really happen.

You can read many more details about the trip, (and about Eva’s electric motorcycle streamliner) on Eva’s blog at http://www.EvaHakansson.com

SOLD! Rider’s Discount, the folks that provide the top quality helmets, gloves, boots, back protectors, etc. for Scotty and Eva, won the bid. Our loyal fans bid it up and gave a welcome boost for Eva’s electric land speed program.

Please visit Rider’s Discount if you are shopping for motorcycle gear and show your appreaciation for their support of the KillaCycle and the ElectroCat.
http://www.ridersdiscount.com

Eva will build a very limited number of these as it is very very time consuming and tedious to make such detailed models. We will put them up for sale on the KillaGear web store.
http://www.KillaGear.com

We used detailed photos of parts of the KillaCycle the same graphics files for the logos on the KillaCycle to make the graphics for the scale model, so they are an exact scale model of the real thing.

We built this scale model because many folks have asked for one, and frankly we really need the money to support our racing efforts. Help the KillaCycle go even faster by actively bidding on this very detailed 1/9th scale model of the KillaCycle, built by the KillaCycle team. The more you bid, the faster we will get the bike to go!

Eva did a LOT of the packing and organizing while I went through the bike and built spare motors.

We are really looking forward to racing head-to-head agianst the top drag bike teams in New Zealand. We are very excited to having Ian Wilkins on his fast and spectacular-looking drag bike in the other lane against the Killacycle.

We will be racing Ian Wilkins at Meremere drag strip on January 31st. The day before, we will be displaying the KillaCycle at the “Show and Shine” associated with that event.

Take a few moments to visit the “New Zealand 2010″ gallery in our photo album to see Ian’s drop dead gorgeous bike (and Eva loading the huge crates on the freight truck.)
http://www.killacycle.com/photos/new-zealand-2010

You can also see our full schedule here: (This will be updated as the times and dates for appearances and race events become finalized.)
Green Stage, New Zealand

Here is a terrific video by Steve Ciciora from this weekend at Bandimere.

(You can go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbi1RhgRrxk if the above link doesn’t load)

Read about it in Eva Hakansson’s blog:

and in this great article by Christine Jerritts in the Denver-Motorsports-Examiner

We have the very latest and most powerful “F1″ cells from A123 Systems. (AONE on the NASDAQ) We are working away building a very lightweight and powerful new battery pack for the KillaCycle from these cells. These are, in fact, the most powerful cells ever produced on the planet by anyone, so they should make the KillaCycle go much much faster on the drag strip.

We plan to make a few other improvements on the bike at the same time that will result in a total weight reduction of over 150 lbs and a power increase to 560 HP. Hopefully, with the weight reduction, the poor tortured motors can take this.

(Still looking for sponsorship for help with an upgrade to brushless motors, by the way.)